Cops Say Brothers, 4 And 6, Rob House

May 10, 1985|By Michael Connelly, Staff Writer

FORT LAUDERDALE — The two burglars broke into the home through a side window and headed straight for the refrigerator. Police said they took chocolate milk, some soda and a bag of apples. Then they got down to business -- ransacking and vandalizing the house and stealing valuables. The loss was estimated at $1,000.

When the culprits were apprehended Wednesday afternoon, they showed no remorse, police said. Each suspect stood there -- blond-haired, blue-eyed and less than four feet tall -- and blamed the other. The culprits are brothers, police said, 4 and 6 years old.

``It`s unbelievable. They`re little kids,`` said Michael Ferreira, 32, whose home in the 1000 block of Northwest 11th Place was ransacked by the kid burglars, police said.

``It`s weird,`` Ferreira said. ``They went everywhere. From the refrigerator to the bedrooms. It`s hard to believe two little kids could do so much damage. They literally destroyed some of our belongings.``

A Fort Lauderdale police officer who investigated the break-in wrote in a report that the boys might have been accompanied by or told to burglarize the home by an adult and that they could be responsible for similar incidents in the neighborhood.

Police said the stolen property -- jewelry and cash -- has not been recovered, and the boys gave conflicting stories about the burglary.

Ferreira said the boys live nearby and could have seen him leave the house about noon Wednesday to do laundry. Ferreira`s roommate, Robert Vanderbunte, 26, was at work.

The break-in was discovered about 1 p.m., police said, when Vanderbunte came home for lunch and found the 4-year-old in the closed garage. He walked the boy home and returned to his own house to find nearly every room ransacked, police said.

According to reports, burglars had broken two windows on the side of the house to gain entry. The kitchen trash can had been turned over, and the refrigerator had been raided. Power tools were thrown about. A watch and $100 in change were taken from one bedroom; a $500 ring was taken from another. Several collector comic books, valued at $75, were destroyed, as were a $200 radio and art works Ferreira had made.

Inside the master bedroom, police found a box filled with merchandise the burglars apparently intended to take with them. Among the items in it were the apples taken from the refrigerator. The burglars also vandalized a bathroom and dumped bottles of cologne into the tub.

Police were called and interviewed the 4-year-old, who admitted he had been in the house with his older brother.

``Both children had extreme difficulty telling the truth,`` a police report says. ``They changed their stories several times and blamed each other. They did not seem at all remorseful.``

According to reports, the boys changed their story at one point to say a 19- year-old relative ``put them up to it`` but later changed that story to say a man they did not know broke into the house with them.

Because of their ages, the boys were not charged with any crime or taken into custody, police said. Officials said the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services will be notified of the incident.

According to the police report, neighbors and relatives of the boys told officers they had been involved in neighborhood vandalism before, including an incident in which a neighbor`s pet rabbit was killed. The report also said that the boys` mother was not upset when told of the break-in Wednesday.

``She didn`t seem overly concerned,`` the report states. ``She also was not concerned about assisting in retrieving the (missing) property.``

But the mother said Thursday that the report was not true.

``I am concerned about it, but it`s hard for me to believe they even did it,`` she said. ``They`re just small, little boys. How could they break into a locked house like that and make all that mess?``